


Bleed Like Me

by Katsuko



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo 2012 [13]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 22:24:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katsuko/pseuds/Katsuko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If a day was part of the week, something was going to try its damnedest to kill him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleed Like Me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://hc-bingo.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**hc_bingo**](http://hc-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) , the prompt being "sever/life-threatening illness."

Tony Stark was seriously beginning to think that if a day was part of the week, something was going to try its damnedest to kill him.

His most recent life history had some _sparkling_ examples. First off, he'd nearly been killed in Afghanistan by one of his own weapons. Then he'd been hooked up to a car battery to keep him living until he made his terrorist captors one of his new Jericho missiles. After instead making a miniature arc reactor to replace said car battery with and an escape suit, he'd come close to dying in the escape attempt. Then fucking Obadiah Stane had ripped said arc reactor out of his chest because fuck you Tony. And when that attempt failed, Obie'd tried beating him to death with his own roid rage version of the Iron Man suit.

So, it only made _perfect goddamned sense_ that the arc reactor that was keeping him alive had decided to kill him, too.

Tony had first noticed something weird about two weeks ago. He'd stepped out of the shower one morning to discover an odd pattern of... something, not bruises or anything like that, on his chest right around the arc reactor. The immediate reaction he'd had was to head for the lab (after throwing on some pants) and have JARVIS start running tests on the reactor itself and his blood work to find out what might be going on.

It turned out that long-term exposure to palladium, especially if it was used in an electromagnet that spent ninety-nine point nine percent of the time in one's own chest, could cause blood poisoning. Who knew?

Tony immediately started searching for a replacement to the palladium core, because the only other option he could think of was attaching a power cord to the arc reactor and plugging himself into the damned wall, which would look hilarious but be detrimental to doing just about anything else but surviving. Even as he worked on finding a solution and set JARVIS to work running scenarios with any potential replacement elements, he set up a health regiment to try and decelerate the course of the poisoning. So far only chlorophyll smoothies even slowed down the progress, but even that didn't stop the poisoning completely.

The levels of palladium in his bloodstream was rising, JARVIS' test scenarios for a replacement to the core were failing one after the other, and the marks on Tony's skin revealing the effects of the poisoning were getting worse.

So Tony did the only other thing he could do.

Without conferring with anyone at Stark Industries, Tony announced that he would be holding the first Stark Expo since 1974 in Manhattan and that the event would be set to run for a full year. He started making plans to make Pepper the CEO of Stark Industries, because he wanted the company that his father had built to be in good hands. He started looking for anything that may have been Howard's, wondering what had been kept and what had been trashed after his death, because even if the man hadn't been a candidate for World's Greatest Dad Tony had still loved the guy and wanted to feel some sort of brief connection with him before his own end.

When JARVIS found the original Stark Expo '74 footage on Stark Industries' digital archives, he'd come very close to tears. He'd forgotten how larger than life Howard had been growing up, how he only really felt closest to his dad when they were working with their hands on something. Howard had been there when Tony rebuilt his first engine after all, talking him through the steps and showing him what went where. Those moments had grown rarer as both Starks got older, and by the time Tony was a teenager he was convinced that Howard Stark was the worst father in the world.

But now, faced with his own mortality, having even that briefest of connections to his father and the short time they were able to spend together was something he wished they'd had more time to forge.

So Tony thanked JARVIS, wondered what Howard would have thought of an artificial intelligence as advanced as the one he'd programmed from scratch, and settled in to watch his father charm the audience of 1974. With any luck, Howard would be able to charm the audience of 2010 just as well.


End file.
